To double our mortgage at 36?

A couple of points.
Have you considered the extra bills? Council tax is most likely going up and energy /maintenance on an old property can be really high.
I was listening to a programme today where the commentators were saying the prospect of price drops in the housing market are a very real possibility at the moment. We will probably know more after the budget next week.
The house sounds great and the distance wouldn’t bother me. Just make sure the sums really do work.

A couple of points.
Have you considered the extra bills? Council tax is most likely going up and energy /maintenance on an old property can be really high.
I was listening to a programme today where the commentators were saying the prospect of price drops in the housing market are a very real possibility at the moment. We will probably know more after the budget next week.
The house sounds great and the distance wouldn’t bother me. Just make sure the sums really do work.

Yes, very few real develpment opportunities now. We're also seasoned renovators but, realistically, even if your DH has a well paid full-time job you need to be careful what you take on. There are usually unexpected costs in renovations and you often spend more on upgrading kitchens, bathrooms and floors than you intended to do. If there were to be a sudden drop in your household income for any reason you could have serious problems with a bigger mortgage on a part-renovated home.

We renovated whilst doing full-time jobs and it was pretty tough, but the houses were large enough to enable us to live there whilst we took our time doing the work in different parts of the building. We had relatively small mortgages, with a really good profit at the end of it. I'm not convinced that the current housing market and potential new goverment tax regimes mean that this would be possible now.

We're also older and no longer doing renovations, in fact we sub-contracted the work to tradesmen for much of the last two that we undertook. My DH (a civil engineer) did manage all the work though.

Agree. If it's 40 mins each way twice a day and it's currently 10 each way, you'll be spending 2 ADDITIONAL hours a day on the school run.

For me, it’s not so much the cash (although that level of debt would worry me), but more your daughter, who might love being rural with goats and stuff now, but as a teen, she’ll likely to want to be able to go out with her friends without relying on you for lifts all the time. The house sounds idyllic though OP!

@EponymousEponine

Wouldn't it be sensible to wait to see what happens with the budget?

I mean sounds interesting on paper but can you actually afford to live in it long term if the property tax is applied? Bills keep going up not down.

I suspect you may regret it long term and wish you were in a more manageable property in the long run.

Don't fall into the aspirational trap of forever home. Think about a forever lifestyle instead, free of stress and worry.

This all makes sense, why move if your current house is more convenient in every way? There's no guarantee than you'd make as much money on a new house as you hope, particularly with the housing market as it is now. You could be stuck with a house worth less than you'd hoped in new area, no profit and no real advantages over your current perfectly nice house.
Your DH has a decent salary, your DC are settled, you are near your DF - why not just enjoy all this and perhaps finish paying your mortgage a little earlier than you expected. Or put extra into your pension(s) so that you have a better retirement.

I got divorced at 36 and bought my current place at 38, with a bigger mortgage than we had on the marital home but paying it solo so effectively more than doubled. But that was a tiny mortgage compared to yours.

CAN you afford it, for your forever home?

Yep - it absolutely sucks! Harder than I ever thought it would be. Particularly now he doesn’t recognise me anymore. Can’t do any of the things he used to love to do, so no quality of life.

ANYWAY. It is what it is 🤷🏻‍♀️ Good luck with house decisions though 🙂

This.

Where we live, any potential money making opportunities no longer exist. Developers snap up any bargains before they’ve even hit the market, and when I say bargain, I mean any house with a sliver of potential profit. Certainly no 500k houses are being flipped for a million any more. And the only people that do buy any potential bargains are builders or proper developers with huge reserves of capital. I’m afraid that doing up one house does not make you a ‘seasoned developer’, op!

You outline some pitfalls associated with the property. I imagine there are many more, because if it is the gift horse you think it is, it will have been snapped up long ago. Remember that builders and materials cost a fortune too. I’m sure you know that already though!

I wish you luck. I can see why you want to do it, it sounds amazing, but do check it out really thoroughly before committing to a money pit that will break you as you get older!

Sorry to sound so negative. Dh is a builder and we’ve done a fair few places in our time but now we’re 50 are breathing a sigh of relief that the only work hanging over us is routine maintenance and redecoration!

I think you should do it, I moved into a new house when I was 38 and more than doubled my mortgage. Life is too short for the what ifs. It sounds like a cool opportunity for life changing amounts of money at the end. Unsure how long your kids have left at their school but I would probably think about moving them somewhere closer. 40 mins each way is a huge amount of dead and wasted time.

I wouldn't do it for this house. 40 mins drive from school is quite unpleasant for your children, especially considering they have additional needs.

This. It’s not the fact of the drive.

Its 15 hours a week at least for your kids sitting in the car bored, hungry, tired, wanting to play with their friends or just get home and chill.

sitting in a car is horribly unproductive time and you are essentially adding two full work days of it into the working week for both you and your children.

Thats 3 hours driving without you going out and about during school hours. What if your DC want to go to clubs such as Cubs with their school friends, how is that going to work.? Or one is in an after school club and the others aren’t etc etc?

The travel isn't sustainable for children or you. How do you envisage having 3 hours on the road per day and doing everything you currently do?

Don't underestimate the length of that commute on children, especially children with additional needs.

I echo the comments above about the commute. We considered the length of the day very carefully when choosing a secondary school for our eldest (who is autistic) and chose the local one to maximise her down time outside school. Other options would have included a 45-60 min commute. That extra time to decompress (plus the fact that most of her friends are local) has really worked for us. I wouldn’t give it up for a 40 min commute for any money- some days she’s mute after school so I’ve no idea how she’d cope with a commute like that. That said, your children could be very different to my daughter.

and that’s without considering your dad and his future needs.

Personally I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t want to be tied to a mortgage passed the age of 55 at the most. I’d much rather have spare money to make memories, go on holiday and have treats wih my friends and family.

i also wouldn’t want to be travelling 40mins to school, what happens if you are unwell or the car doesn’t start, how do you get your children to school? How do your future teens go out with school friends for the day when you live 40mins away?

what if dh can’t go to work due to illness, what if dh loses his job? Who pays the bills, who pays the mortgage?

you need to think of every eventuality when stretching your budget so much.

dh had an accident at work and couldn’t work for 6months so these things do happen.

Putting all the house stuff to one side for a minute - I do think you have to factor in what you will want to do for your Dad. My DF has advanced dementia now and his care home is 15 minutes from my house. That means if I go down and he’s asleep or having a bad day, it’s upsetting but I know I’ll be able to do another pop in within a couple of days. It means when anything happens I’m there within moments. It means I can pop in over my lunch hour and be back without work being impacted.

It’s an arduous journey having a parent with dementia. It’s even worse if, like me, you’re the only child who bears the burden. My dad would say exactly as yours if we wanted to move - and I would rather cut off my right arm than make myself less available to him. We have a future move planned but it won’t happen until Dad goes, for that reason. So it’s important to factor all of that in, alongside the house maths.

The money wouldn’t be the issue as far as I’m concerned but the commute and the damp issues would be!

Have you done the school run at rush hour - go out earlier in the morning and drive from the village and back at the time you would need to leave - 40mins could be far longer at that time! I live less than a 5 minutes drive from my child's nursery and when it’s raining or there are roadworks it takes 20-30minutes! I commuted for years and when you tot up how much of your life is spent sitting in traffic it is thoroughly depressing. You are looking at a minimum of an hour and 20minutes return journey twice a day for the next decade or so - that’s 2 hours and 40 minutes a day or 13 hours and 20 minutes over 5 days!

Have you had a company that specialises in damp to assess the house? I ask this as my mum was at the closing stages of buying a gorgeous old house she was totally in love with and they found that due to water under the house it was sinking into it’s own foundation. Also think of climate change, if the bottom of the garden floods now in ten years that could be the house. Will your house be insurable in this instance? How much will it cost to get the septic tank made compliant?

I agree with this. We went 2.5x mortgage in late 30s as a very high earning couple. But now late 40s, I wish I hadn’t (tho I love the house and location) and rather wish I was close to paying it off. If I could do it again, I’d choose a cheaper location and compact size unless I was buying in early 30s and high double income.

It sounds too far away and too expensive.

We went from 380k mortgage to £660k mortgage at 38yrs old, so my appetite for debt is fairly robust.

I think you’re kidding yourself giving a £200k reno cost (yes, I live I’m a seasoned renovator who has so far sunk £150k on my 1800s house).

That would be my concern - poor credit and a large mortgage will be very expensive. Looking to double the amount of borrowing while taking the LTV from less than 60% to 90% is not only going to make it more expensive, but severely limit the number of lenders I would have thought.

For someone who could borrow at competitive rates and could pay down the debt reasonably quickly then it sounds like it would be a great opportunity to create a fantastic family home. Borrowing £450k with a combined income of just over £100k ought to be doable.

But, I also wouldn’t be banking on a buoyant property market in the short to medium term, and if the £1m valuation for the finished project was actually nearer £800k, and the cost of refurbing £250k not £200k then you’ve gone from adding £400k of value to £150k, and the interest cost on the extra borrowing over 10 years might easily wipe that out.

Rural living is fine with toddlers. As they get older you’ll spend half your life in the car ferrying them here there and everywhere.

I think it might be a bit selfish to give your kids a 90 minute daily commute for the sake of a double fronted house.